Okay, I intentionally avoided yesterday’s Interstellar trailer, but this one I think I can safely watch. This first trailer, from iTunes Trailers, is obviously the very definition of a teaser trailer, offering not a hint of plot or even all-that-much character. We get a serious of somewhat random images and a cast roll-call of sorts, set to what I presume is an instrumental version of one of the main songs to the original play. To those unaware, Into the Woods is a Stephen Sondheim play first performed in 1986 that involves various classic fairy tale characters (the big bad wolf, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, etc.) in a somewhat older-skewing morality play that subverts and deconstructs some of the fairy tale tropes. You wouldn’t get any of that from the teaser above, but that’s somewhat the point. This teaser, like any number of teasers for film adaptations of famed musicals (think Rent or Phantom of the Opera), is meant to curry favor with those who presumably already know what is being sold. As such, we get the big cast (Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, Anna Kendrick, Lilla Crawford, Daniel Huttlestone, MacKenzie Mauzy, James Corden, Emily Blunt, and Johnny Depp. We get various visual bits of era-appropriate intrigue and basically a single line of relevant dialogue from Ms. Streep. Amusingly, is still somewhat hiding just what Johnny Depp as the Big Bad Wolf will actually look like, but I’m always in favor of a little mystery in these early teases. On the other hand, despite the fact that this teaser is basically for those who are already anticipating the film, there is not a drop of actual singing in the teaser. Marketing campaigns for musicals are infamous for hiding the actual on-screen singing (think Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, which apparently caused outrage when ignorant Burton fans didn’t realize that Johnny Depp was going to be singing for his meat pie supper), so it will be worth paying attention to see if the next theatrical trailer actually has Kendrick and company belting tunes from the original show. The film, which is set to drop on Christmas Day, underwent about a week of controversy when Sondheim claimed in an interview with The New Yorker that Disney had somewhat gutted the more adult-skewing portions of the original show before more-or-less retracting said statements. As I wrote back in June when the “scandal” broke, the success or failure of this film will rest not on the approval of the die-hard fans but on the mass audience interest in spending Christmas weekend taking the family to see a fairy tale adventure starring a host of would-be movie stars from various demographic groups. Like any big-budget comic book adventure, the key to success isn’t pleasing the die-hards who have already mentally bought their Thursday night tickets but making a successful sell to those with at-best passing knowledge of the source material. The bad news is that the film is directed by Rob Marshall who, all due respect, has yet to make an honest-to-goodness good movie. If you liked Chicago, then you can alter that statement accordingly. But Memoirs of a Geisha and Nine didn’t work out and he then spent $410 million (article from Forbes contributor Christian Sylt) on the smallest-scale, most visually drab, and most inexplicably dull Pirates of the Caribbean movie imaginable. Still, the guy turned Alan Cummings into a star with his 1998 Cabaret revival, so my wife will always be thankful for that. And as always, since I’m prejudging, if he pulls this off I will shout a thousand “mea culpa”s to the high heavens. I’ll discuss this one more as the release date draws closer, but it is certainly the kind of ambitious, star-driven, and female-centric picture that we want to see from Disney as the year draws to a close. I don’t think the would-be changes will hurt the box office. But I do think accusations of “watering-down” the original content, if said accusations prove to be remotely true, will seriously hurt any year-end awards consideration that Disney is presumably gunning for. And it is a little odd that the big-scale filmed musical, a borderline endangered species, will have two major entries within a week of each other, as Annie drops December 17th. As someone who likes this stuff when it’s done well (I still think Hairspray is an under-loved gem), I have no objection to this potential embarrassment of riches. Into the Woods opens from Walt Disney on December 25th. As always, we’ll see. For those who know the original play better than I, did this teaser fill you with the same goosebumps that I got from the first Rent teaser?
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